Legend – Complete Score – Limited 1500 – OOP – Tangerine Dream

The music for LEGEND was a subject of great controversy in 1985. Initially, Ridley Scott had turned to composer Jerry Goldsmith to score the film, which would reunite them after their great success on ALIEN in 1979. Goldsmith responded by writing an enchanting, organic symphonic score emphasizing strings, woodwinds and choir, a score that the composer, the director of the film and many others felt was among Goldsmith’s best work. After a disappointing test screening, studio executives encouraged Ridley Scott to replace the music with something that would be more commercially appealing to the film’s expected youth market. Tangerine Dream had realized great success with their score to RISKY BUSINESS in 1983, another film aimed at the youth market and so they were hired to compose a brand new score for the film.Tangerine Dream ultimately composed 80 minutes of music for LEGEND, using 35 different synthesizers, yielding a score that many feel is the group’s finest musical endeavor for film. Despite inevitable comparison between the two scores, the music that Tangerine Dream composed for the film was extremely effective and remains their most lyrical and complex work for films, from the delicate melody for Nell’s Cottage, the hauntingly fragile melody for the Unicorns, the crackling percussive motif for the Goblins and and the pervasive dark synthetic pulses associated with Darkness